Hartmann Report

The Senate is profoundly anti-democratic (a crisis amplified by the filibuster), and adding two or three states will only partially correct that, but it’s still a big step toward a More Perfect Union. Three republican presidents added new states, in every case to hold onto a Republican Senate. Lincoln did it. Grant did it. Harrison did it. If he gets reelected in 2024, Biden must do it and Democrats need to prepare the ground now. Recently, Mitch McConnell was on TV telling wealthy donors to a fundraiser in Kentucky, "We've got a 50-50 Senate right now. We've got a 50-50 nation."... This is the GOP's favorite meme — if you listen to the news, particularly the political-leaning shows, you will hear it frequently — and it's a complete lie.

It's time to call them what they are. There's nothing noble about mass murder... Imagine how the GOP would react if there was a religious sect within the country that kept blowing themselves up to kill as many Americans as possible. Like in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel. If they were brown-skinned Muslims — or lefty leftovers from the Weather Underground — strapping on suicide vests and exploding themselves in schools, malls, or places of worship, you can easily anticipate the Republican reaction.

We've done it before... Steven Spainhouer's son worked at one of the stores in the Allen, Texas shopping mall chosen by America's most recent mass shooter (as of Saturday: there were seven this weekend). He arrived at the mall just after the neo-nazi murderer had slaughtered several people, sometimes ripping their bodies and faces into an indistinguishable mass of flesh with his military style ammunition... All because a white supremacist with a "Right Wing Death Squad" patch — commonly worn by Proud Boys — across his chest decided to shoot up a Texas shopping center with a mass-market version of the rifle the Army developed in the 1960s for hunting people in Vietnam.

How Europe’s History of Mercenaries and Military Coups Shaped the Second Amendment. "That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." —George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Did Clarence Thomas take a bribe via his wife to gut the Voting Rights Act? — "No Dogs or Chinese!" — Did Trump sell those stolen top-secret documents to the Saudis in exchange for the nearly $3 billion that country has given his family since he left the White House? — Texas is forcing physicians to create phony "abortion complications" reports for a statewide database, and doctors in the state are furious. — CNN says, "We don't need no stinkin' cop's opinions!" — Is the banking crisis deepening or is this a power play by big banks? — Next up in the Republican War on Women™: no-fault divorce. — Pigeon Alert! Almost fifty years ago, I learned from a street performer in New York City that pigeons are actually robotic spies from the planet Xenu, but now US scientists think they can fool them.

For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today, it’s a corrupt neofascist oligarchy. Europeans refer to it as “soft fascism” - Orban succeeded in pulling off what Donald Trump tried… People watch with their mouths agape, trying to understand the scandal of Donald Trump leading a criminal insurrection to hold onto power even though he’d lost the election; of Supreme Court justices on the take; of political figures putting into law religious doctrine about the role of women in society. They’re astonished by a media industry that seems to be a captive of the billionaire neofascist class. They can’t figure out why extraordinarily wealthy people spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year stirring people up to hate each other. They don’t understand why the morbidly rich are leading a campaign to destroy public schools, end Social Security, and prevent people from voting. Why are these people so committed to propagating ideas and doing things that seem so antithetical to historic American standards of government and ethical behavior? Of democracy itself?

The only way Republicans can hold onto power is with their phony proclamations of “voter fraud” as the excuse to restrict the franchise to white people through restrictions, purges, and intimidation. Two years ago, Texas Republicans set out to rig the 2022 election, passing into law Senate Bill 1 over the objection of Democratic legislators who left the state to try to block its passage... This follows a decade of similar attempts to suppress the vote of anybody who isn’t white and middle aged/middle class. As the Texas Civil Rights Project noted, in just the first 4 years after corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013, Texas Republicans closed 1,173 polling places in counties — predominantly Black and Hispanic — that had previously been protected from manipulation by the VRA.

It’s time to call a fascist a fascist, speaking of CNN’s upcoming attempt to rehabilitate Trump with a sanitized “Town Hall” and a mostly MAGA audience... Next week, CNN will take a shot at normalizing American fascist movement leader and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, a man who openly embraces murderous Nazis, Vladimir Putin, white supremacy, misogyny, religious bigotry, and political violence. They will feature and fete a career criminal who over 20 women have claimed raped or sexually assaulted them.

So, what do we do? A woman called into my radio/TV program yesterday, sobbing. She’s both terrified and angry about the way the GOP is scapegoating queer youth and the impact it’s having on her daughter and her friends. You can click on the audio file at the end of this article to hear it for yourself... Black people in America know this phenomenon well. It’s called “weathering”: the slow, steady, daily drip-drip-drip of closed doors to opportunity, microaggressions, and distrust, all punctuated by the occasional violent or even deadly all-out attack.

The only businesses Republicans support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors & giant monopolies - and none of those are good for average Americans or the US economy… “The chief business of the American people is business.” — Calvin Coolidge. As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn. All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.” It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Republicans destroy small business